random posts

Friday, 8 July 2016

The fatal accident involving a tractor-trailer and driverless carriage, the brilliant BLDGBlog reports, was certainly a tragedy, but also prizes out insights into the increasingly inscrutable realm of machine perception.Just as the component influences of complex algorithms quickly grow beyond human comprehension and artificial intelligences behave in ways that their programmers could not predict, it’s rare that we bother trying to understand how a machine sees and judges accordingly. When things run like clockwork, I suppose we are not that considered about what’s under the hood and how it works. Diagnostics revealed that the robot car could not distinguish between the chassis of the truck and the sky, forwarding further thought on the design of infrastructure and of space in general (the home, highway, office and warehouse) to make it more (or less) machine-accessible. What do you think? Is real-estate to be landscaped for use by computers, much like most of the traffic of the internet, or are those unreasonable accommodations?